Alienware's newest version of its flagship desktop PC has landed, and as expected it is ridiculously powerful and ruinously expensive. On the components side, it is equipped with an Intel Core i7-960 CPU clocked at 3.2 Ghz, 6GB of DDR3 RAM and not one but two ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards. These powerful parts combine to crush modern games, such as Far Cry 2 which it dominated by running it at 158 fps at a resolution of 2,560x1,600.

Clearly, this behemoth isn't for everyone, but if gaming is your passion and you're hoarding a pirate's chest full of gold, then spending a bit of that booty on Alienware's newest Area 51 will keep you smiling for a long time. Just be prepared to do some heavy lifting, as the Area 51 weighs a whopping 125 pounds.

Here are some highlights from our review:

"On Futuremark’s 64-bit PCMark Vantage test, which measures overall system performance, the Area 51 scored very high—10,337—though it lagged behind our current desktop-PC leader on this test, the Maingear Shift, by more than 9,000 points. While that sounds like a lot, it should be noted that the $7,000 Maingear system was as tricked out as it gets: It was equipped with an overclocked Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU running at 3.98GHz and had three ATI cards running in CrossFireX mode, as well as a pair of solid-state drives configured using RAID 0."

"Video- and audio-encoding times were predictably fast. The Area 51 finished our iTunes test in 2 minutes and 30 seconds, and our Windows Media Encoder (WME) test in 1 minute and 53 seconds."

"Real-world gaming test results were more impressive. On our DirectX 9 Far Cry 2 benchmark test, the Area 51 managed a score of 149 frames per second (fps) at the highest resolution (2,560x1,600), which edged out the Aurora (130fps)..."